Meet Me in Gaza (14 page)

But I missed the intensity of Gaza, I really did – and being away made me realise how much I wanted to go back. When I said this to Alla’, she shrugged and bought presents for me to take to her family. But when my taxi to Gaza arrived at her place this morning, tears sprang from her eyes. She pressed her lips together and shook her head, as though trying to rid herself of her own thoughts, and kissed me hard.

‘Kiss my family for me,’ she said.

I flit between these occupied spaces of the West Bank and Gaza, visiting her family, but
they
never get to kiss each other.

The Palestinian driving me down to Gaza in his taxi asked me if we could give someone a lift to Gaza, a woman he knew whose son was in hospital in Israel. When we picked her up, she was a rake-thin, timid-looking lady who said barely a word for most of the journey. It was only during the last couple of miles to the Erez crossing, as we sped past emerald groves of orange trees lining both sides of the road, that she told me about her 19-year-old son, Muhammad. He had been shot by Hamas, she said, ‘by mistake’, during a row. After fifteen months in a Jerusalem hospital, Muhammad still couldn’t walk, or use his right arm, because his brain was damaged. She had waited months for a permit from Israel to visit her son in the hospital and had no idea when she would see him again. She was going home to Beit Hanoun.

I told her that when we reached Erez, we would have to go through the crossing separately and she gave a passive nod. I felt rude saying it, but told myself I didn’t know her or her son and didn’t want to be refused entry into Gaza because I was in the company of someone the Israelis had their eye on. Gazing out of the car window afterwards, I thought to myself, ‘Jesus, this place makes you paranoid.’ When we got to the closed crossing, she took her bags, thanked me and walked away.

After an hour or so, the explosions go quiet. But the crossing remains closed. A few more people arrive and join our lethargic queue. I notice a young man carrying a backpack and clutching a book in one hand. He looks around, sees that I am alone too, walks over and asks me in stilted English if this is the way to Gaza.

‘Yes it is,’ I say, ‘but do you have an entry permit?’

‘Entry permit?’ he repeats uncertainly. I glance at his book; it looks like a Japanese travel guide.

‘Are you Japanese?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you want to go to Gaza?’

‘I want to see the suffering of the Palestinian people.’

His reply is so straight-up, I am stumped for words. I point him towards the Israeli officer in the booth by the main gate and wish him luck.

Two hours later, maybe more, the Israelis finally start allowing us inside the Erez crossing main terminal building, in small batches of Gazans and foreigners. Once inside, we are still on the Israeli side of the crossing, waiting to be processed like suspect parcels. In order to cross over to Gaza, we each have to go through Israeli passport control. This can take anything between ten minutes and five hours, depending on lots of factors, including whether the shelling resumes and how long the Israelis feel like keeping us waiting. One of the passport control officers is sitting in her bulletproof booth now, just a few metres in front of my nailed-down plastic chair, filing her nails, clearly in no rush at all.

‘Erez’ means cedar tree in Hebrew, an Israeli symbol of nobility. These days, the crossing looks like something out of a James Bond film. But when first rigged up, in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai war – Israel’s first brief military occupation of Gaza – it was a simple wooden checkpoint.
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In 1967 Israel re-invaded Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai peninsula; during the early days of this second Israeli occupation, Gazans continued to work as labourers in Israel and Israeli soldiers didn’t even bother checking the few Palestinian cars going back and forth across Erez. The right-wing Israeli Likud Party’s Zionist mantra – that all Palestine was part of Eretz Israel (‘Greater Israel’) – was one of the main reasons that Erez was dismantled in the early 1970s. And with the checkpoint gone, Palestinians moved around their own country more freely than they had done since 1948.

But after the infamous ‘Bus 300’ hijacking in April 1984, the Erez crossing was re-erected and reinforced.
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On some days, the queue of Gazan labourers at the crossing stretched for up to 2 miles in either direction. On the Gazan side, Palestinians were corralled into metal walkways like cattle and they cursed the fortified crossing as
al-mahlab
, ‘the milking station’. Israel handed over the administration of Gaza to the new Palestinian National Authority (PA) in 1994 – but kept control of Erez (plus Gaza’s airspace, land borders and territorial waters) and built the 37-mile barrier that encircles northern and eastern Gaza, severing it from the outside world.
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I perch on a moulded plastic chair, trying to read my novel. But it’s hard to concentrate when I know that every flicker of my eyelids is being recorded. Most of the other foreigners waiting to be processed are medical aid workers. I know this because they are wearing sleeveless vests branded with the names of their organisations. As I look around this vast fortified chamber a couple of people catch my eye, and we smile, but without moving from our seats, like pieces of chess waiting to be played. The woman who drove down here with me hasn’t appeared inside the terminal. Maybe she got stopped at the first gate. Or turned back. Or maybe she is being interrogated. I hope she makes it home today.

Eventually, just when I really need the toilet, one of the foreign aid workers gets called into a passport booth. Most of us immediately stand too, scooping our bags and suitcases together, wired and nervous in case we are next. My name is called by the woman who has long finished filing her nails. I step up to her booth, slide my passport and documents under the glass towards her. The knot in my guts is taut because I’m nervous and intimidated, and I resent her for this. She asks a few questions about why I’m going to Gaza. I go into role play, giving very little information, feigning polite boredom while maintaining direct eye contact. She stares me down, turns to the computer screen in front of her, eyes flickering right to left until she finishes scanning. With a slight nod, she stamps my passport and slides it back.

‘Thank you,’ I say, picking up my bags and walking out of the booth. Foreigners’ luggage is rarely searched en route into Gaza – just on the way back into Israel.

In front of me, on the far wall, is a signpost:

Gaza

I follow the sign into a long windowless corridor, suddenly amused by the clinking of glass inside my suitcase. Come to think of it, I could do with a swig right now.

In front of me now is a high metal gate. As I approach, it opens with a loud click. I step through. Ahead is a solid wall. I approach it slowly too and whoever is watching me presses a switch or a computer key. A section of the wall glides upwards, like the door to a secret passage. And there is Gaza. I step through the open section of wall and it glides back down, sealing me inside.

Now I am on a wooden walkway, with lines of razor wire on either side. The walkway leads to the tunnel that spits pedestrians out into no-man’s-land, the final stage of walking into Gaza. Gazan porters work on this Palestinian side of the Erez crossing, ferrying people’s luggage back and forth across no-man’s-land; I can see one of them hurrying towards me now, from the other end of the wooden walkway, eager to carry my bags for a fee. But I stand still, distracted. Staring out at the fields just beyond the razor wire, where, no more than a few hundred metres from the perimeter of Erez, there is a small row of white cottages. I remember them from the first time I crossed Erez. Then, as now, I wonder who the hell lives there and why, because that’s a crazy place to stay, so close to the Israeli border. Maybe I can get someone to come and visit them with me and meet whoever is living there, right on the front line.

At work, I spend a lot of my time editing documents and reports that the Centre publishes in both Arabic and English. But I get out of the office as much as I can. Recently I suggested we could interview ordinary people across Gaza about their experiences of living under siege and publish the interviews on the Centre’s website.

These narratives have proved to be popular, so I have been encouraged to continue writing them. When I get back to work, I speak to my immediate boss, Hamid, and suggest I could go and interview whoever lives in the row of white cottages next to Erez. Hamid sits back in his chair, thinks about it for a moment and then agrees. He tells me a family called the Swailams have been living in those white cottages for generations (in Gaza people can usually be identified by area, as extended families tend to live within sight of each other, often in the same building). The Swailams used to farm citrus, especially oranges. But Hamid isn’t sure how they are surviving now.

He suggests I take another colleague, Majd, with me to act as interpreter. I’m happy to do so: Majd is broad-chested, has a booming voice and speaks English better than I do. We get on very well. This morning we take a taxi and drive north. We stop briefly in the grimy town of Beit Hanoun to pick up a local contact, a community worker called Samir who knows all the farmers in this corner of Gaza. Samir is young, but has the silver-streaked hair of an older man and a searing gaze. When we meet him, he is polite, but brief, saying little except to direct the driver out of Beit Hanoun, then onto a rutted dirt track amid the fields. A little while later the driver pulls over to the side of the track. He says he will wait for us here. We are 400 or 500 metres south of the white cottages, which look as if they are about the same distance from the razor-wire Erez perimeter.

Majd, Samir and I clamber out of the taxi and start walking towards the cottages. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around, just what looks like a big dog on a chain. It’s late morning, the sun is shining and the warm air is spring fresh. But Majd isn’t happy at all.

‘Why’, he hisses towards my left ear, ‘do we have to walk? Why can’t the driver just wait for us outside the white houses? I have a wife and four children you know, and this … situation is making me absolutely nervous.’

Majd is not from northern Gaza. He lives in the city of Khan Younis, down in the southern Strip, and doesn’t know this area. Samir scowls at Majd – who doesn’t notice – and strides ahead. As we approach, the dog stands and yanks its chain with a sullen growl. Still no one is around – and if we can see that Israeli watchtower, there is no doubt they can see us too. A few other farmhouses are dotted around this area, but the Swailams’ cottages are closest to the buffer zone – the 300-metre military zone that extends along the entire northern and eastern perimeter of Gaza, bordering Israel. The Israeli military patrol the zone day and night and fire warning shots if anyone approaches: anyone reckless or desperate enough to attempt crossing the zone into Israel will be shot dead.
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I felt almost fine a minute ago, but now Majd is making me nervous. We are almost at the row of white cottages, close enough to see the large allotment at the front, facing east, where bright flowers are growing between rows of well-tended vegetables. A few hens are scratching in the dust. It looks for all the world like a traditional smallholding, the kind of place where men and boys have calloused hands and filthy nails, and women and girls bake steaming fresh bread. As long, that is, as you blot out the watchtowers built into the wall ahead and the white sphere suspended above the wall, like a tethered moon, and which I now know is listening to Gaza.

We haven’t seen anyone yet. But hang on – a heavy-set man has just emerged from a doorway and is pounding towards Samir with strong strides. He must be one of the Swailams. Then half a dozen kids appear from nowhere, just as the dog starts barking enthusiastically. Samir and the heavy-set man reach each other and embrace as other men, and women, stream out of doorways to see who has just arrived.

Majd looks at this small crowd, and I hear him exhaling.

‘Louisa, don’t worry, you are safe with me. Everything is hunky-dory now.’

As we all start shaking hands, my anxiety evaporates like clouds in a hot sky. Three or four generations of the Swailam family are here, from chubby toddlers to elders with stooped shoulders and faces like old maps. The man who first strode towards us introduces himself as Jamal Swailam. He is large, handsome and wide-shouldered, with a silver moustache that would make a walrus proud. He beckons us to follow him into the last cottage in the row of four, nearest to Erez.

Samir, Majd and I enter a big kitchen. Jamal offers us white plastic chairs, warped slightly out of shape by previous occupants. There is very little other furniture. Despite the sunlight outside, the kitchen feels cold and slightly damp. Jamal and Samir sit together, heads bent towards each other, talking between themselves.

I shuffle in my chair, trying to get comfortable. Majd nudges me.

‘Look at these walls.’